“Gratitude isn’t an experience that materializes in response to your circumstances. It is a life practice.” – Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey, Build the Life You Want
There’s a lot of talk about gratitude these days. We hear how it can improve our lives—making us more resilient, more connected with our partners and friends, less materialistic, and healthier. More attractive, with clearer skin, and better at the New York Times crossword puzzle. Like exercise and mindfulness, gratitude can feel like a magic elixir that is too good to be true. And like with exercise and mindfulness, it is one thing to know intellectually how gratitude can help us and another thing to thread it through our days. I have struggled to build any kind of consistent practice around gratitude. Instead, it tends to bubble to the surface when the world is already tinted sunset pink—not when I’m anxious or upset.
On Sunday, I was on hour three of ruminating on a series of frustrations while setting up for Noa’s third birthday party with grandparents. I’d tried journaling, a hard run, and talking to David uninterrupted for five minutes. My usual strategies weren’t working. So as I furiously wiped down our already clean windows, I turned on the audiobook of Build the Life You Want by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey. This chapter was about choosing better emotions, and Arthur was starting down the gratitude bandwagon. We’ve heard this all before, my brain said, and went back to drawing big black circles around my frustrations.
Then I heard the words, “say you have a family gathering,” and my attention snagged. I was less than an hour away from such a gathering. The authors suggested making a simple list of gratitudes before getting together with family to put you in a better frame of mind. Fine, I thought. Message received, universe. I’ll give it a try.
And so I made a mental list of five things I was grateful for. It took no longer than 30 seconds. And then I promptly forgot about it. No seismic internal shifts occurred. The world did not immediately get rosier.
But here’s what I now notice, looking back on how the day went from there:
1) Almost immediately, my frustrations faded into the background. I was able to put them in perspective. Brooks and Winfrey describe this as turning down the noise of our natural human negative bias, which makes minor upsets hard to distinguish from real threats.
2) A few hours later, in the middle of the party, I felt myself sinking into the feeling I was most hoping to reach that day—the deep sense of gratitude for Noa’s being in this world and for the adults sitting there at the party who have been her constants. I am always looking to touch my feelings in big moments, and this time, I was able to.
3) That night, I woke at 2 am with my heart full and my eyes wet. I’d had an intense dream about losing multiple family members. But instead of waking up scared, I woke up feeling so full of love. I remind myself cognitively that we can lose our people at any time, but I had the gift of really feeling it for a few hours in the night. All week since then, I’ve been quicker to pick up the phone and tell the people I love that I love them.
I know “the power of gratitude” is nothing new. But the gap can be wide between knowing and doing something different. This is like exercise, I tell myself now as I take another 30 seconds for gratitude during my first sips of coffee—the only bad list is one I didn’t make.
This feels like a loving nudge from my mother to work on a gratitude list! She was doing those all through her cancer journey and even though she was dying and miserable physically, she found things to be grateful for each day.
Thank you for letting us in, yet again, into the big-hearted feeler you are. And for reminding us of a very simple, sometimes eye-roll-inducing, yet very, very important practice...because YES. We can lose our people at any second and that anticipatory grief is so very real for me. But instead of fearing it, I can choose to be grateful for the time I have now, you know? So, thank you.